


all these moments become memories

by Ehwell



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, also apparently an excercise in determining just how many em dashes I can use, answer? a lot, not like super happy just a heads up, this is essentially a Triss character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:42:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25391077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ehwell/pseuds/Ehwell
Summary: And still, Philippa lets Triss continue, lets her kiss her palm softly before pulling her arms tighter around her— lets her do so most nights they spend together.  In these moments, Triss wonders if she truly is the only thing Philippa loves as much her own detachment.After all, she sees how Philippa keeps herself hidden away, safe behind her own arrogance. It doesn’t make Triss love her any less. It just makes the love sharper, harder to carry, harder to let go of— adoration and desecration two sides of the same knife.
Relationships: Philippa Eilhart/Triss Merigold, Triss Merigold & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 9
Kudos: 34





	all these moments become memories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [undermyskin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/undermyskin/gifts).



> Inspired by Bowline by Undermyskin, which, if you haven't read, go check out, it's a masterwork.
> 
> Written to "Tongues and Teeth" by the Crane Wives, "Why Would I Now?" by the Decemberists, as well as "Elephant" by Hannah Georgas which is where the title comes from.

The cold, bluish light filtering through the curtains splays an eerie sort of serenity across the features of Philippa's face—washes over her sharpened cheek bones and softens her jaw, casts aside the hard set contention she wears during her waking hours. 

It is cold here, in this place, Triss thinks— in the sort of limbo she occupies with Philippa whenever she draws near. She remembers the old stories, how the heavens lean close and kiss wonder into earthen things—the reason they call these moon-soaked moments the witching hours. 

Philippa is still sound asleep, fingers still gripping tightly at the blankets wrapped around her, freezing in sleep as she always is— sleeps under two feather duvets even in the summertime, her fingers and toes tinged bluish any time she allows Triss to see her bare skin without other precedent for it— averse to vulnerability in the most tangible and childish ways, Triss thinks. 

Philippa is cold without precedent, and the metaphor there, however accurate, feels like walking pigeon-toed on the blade of a knife in its reckless bluntness. It would be easy to romanticise, she supposes, if Triss were one to allow metaphor to dampen sensation. 

Words that hurt when spoken plainly, reconfigured into poetry become gentler, less like the cutting shards of truth they are if one says, “as she warmed icy fingertips against my heart, time froze— so did I” rather than “I am hopelessly in love with someone who does not love me”.

Triss found herself reading an excess of poetry these days. Unlike back at Aretuza, where she focused on things Tissaia deemed more useful— reading histories of nations and mages and the rise and fall of both— after Sodden Hill she found herself with an abundance of time and an inability to focus on such things. 

It felt like every time she tried to read about history and its inevitable litany of military strategies as kings frittered away lives over the ebb and flow of sovereignty and national borders, all she could think of was the half-singed memories of the Hill as she was burning. 

The more poetry Triss reads, the more she realizes that the only two things ever described in verse as blossoming are flowers and bruises. There is something poignant there she cannot, or perhaps simply doesn’t want to name.

Now that she was awake, she supposes, if she were to get up, to draw back the velvet curtains, to step in between the gossamer lining and the frozen light filtering in from outside, she's sure she'd recognize something in the fractal precision of the frost that adorns the window's panes. Gratuitous as the metaphor may be, Philippa is ever Triss’ opposite, frozen opulence, untouchably aloof to Triss’ gentle warmth.

Triss silently slips out of bed, leans her weight on the windowsill and drags her nails through the frost that has accumulated there on the pane from their breathing. Something about winter, about the cold had always reminded Triss of her. 

It is something she might try to explain to Philippa, she thinks, if Phillippa had the patience for such things. Instead, Triss talks about the early frost and the way the weather seems to occlude the truth of what she’s saying enough to grant plausible deniability that every word she utters isn’t another way to tell Philippa she loves her means she will listen. 

She knows Philippa knows, but lets her do it anyway. There is something to be said for them, in this way. 

There is nothing for which sorceresses are known quite so much as their ability to say what they mean without speaking it. 

Triss has always yearned for the gift of precision, of saying exactly what she means—When she first arrived at Aretuza, she had set about reading every book in the library, fancied herself a word collector— perhaps she has simply always wished she didn’t have to fight to make herself understood.

To mask her true intentions has never come as easily. Triss has always been the type to feel everything in her chest. When Yennefer first pointed out how emotions dart uncontrollably across her face, bleed so softly from her eyes, inadvertently, unintentionally, often accidentally despite trying as hard as she can. Triss has spent as long as she can remember trying to keep her feelings off of her sleeves and failing. 

When she thinks about it, this is the same thing she was scolded for in her first botany lessons at Aretuza. She’d been so fascinated that she hadn’t even realized as she’d dragged her once-pristine sleeves across her mortar and pestle every time she reached for another ingredient until they were already grass stained hopelessly enough for Tissaia to admonish her lack of awareness. 

Shame is not a feeling Triss is unfamiliar with, and she still remembers the simmering ache of it back when she had been so unabashedly eager to please. Triss didn’t think she was particularly funny, not really, not in the way Jaskier was or even the razor sharp barbs exchanged between members of the lodge, but still, when she’d first met Yennefer, her oldest friend— dearest, too, though she suspected Yen wouldn’t meet her eyes if she’d said so— Triss had been struck by a desperate urge to make this pitiful creature laugh because how desperately sad she looked. 

Though, perhaps, she had also found some sort of kinship in how back then Yennefer too seemed to have her feelings pouring from her eyes. Sure, misery loves its company but she had thought that perhaps she was sad only because she was alone. 

There is some sort of irony there— in the realization of this truth from so early on yet despite knowing, being unable to reconcile the way she found herself driven into any arms that seemed like they might allow her a place to be held.

“Look,” she had said, dropping into the seat adjacent to Yennefer and gesturing to the greenish stains on the cuffs of her dress which she had tried and failed to scrub out in the sink before lunch, “Tissaia always says I am too sensitive but clearly I am well on my way to being jaded.” 

There is some sort of irony there— in the poignancy of a future-occluded truth. Here, in Montecalvo, is she not a living monument to a childish prediction— equal parts a testament and a warning to heed the power of words. 

Triss remembers the conversation she had with Yennefer just the night before, when she hadn’t known who else to turn to and felt herself spinning out of control. When Yennefer had answered, her eyes had gone soft, letting the facade slip ever so slightly, but enough to make Triss feel as though they were back at Aretuza. 

That they were back in a time when Yennefer looked at her with the kind of softness she so desperately craved, eyes sparkling at the stupid joke, shame of sloppy botanicals and unmet expectations forgotten. 

Back in that moment lifetimes ago when Yennefer had smiled so softly at her before she reached out to pinch the still-wet fabric between her fingers as she whispered, “ess aep taedh ess”— Elder, something Triss didn’t recognize, and her sleeves were suddenly as crisp and dry as they’d been that morning before they became just another lost cause on her laundry list of all the things her carelessness had ruined. 

The way Yennefer looked at her sometimes, even with the way the megascope refracts her form and blunts her features, is unmistakable—Yennefer feels sorry for her. She remembers reading somewhere, a line, a stanza maybe that called pity the emotion that feasts while it talks about the starving. 

Triss thinks she agrees— after all, what is pity but half-sincere expressions of regret without offering anything real. Triss is used to being condescended to, to being held at an arm's length sometimes out of fear and other times out of shame. She knows how to swallow the resulting sensation as it boils up in her throat. 

But pity— the least laborious form of caring— allows the bearer proof of proximity to your existence without necessitating the tangible effort that love requires. She wants to call Yennefer on it— on only caring enough to cringe, but she can’t seem to put the thought into words, cannot seem to make herself understood, cannot seem to get the thought out in a way that does not strip it of its meaning.

There is also something in this realization that tastes almost indistinguishable from shame. 

— 

Pain is uniquely, intrinsically ineffable— one of its cruelest qualities. That is what had awoken her in the first place. There is a continuous dull thud, a pulsing ache that beats itself down her insides, threads itself between her ribs with the same tenacity of ivy that grows everywhere which has been abandoned as time snuffs out even its facsimile in the annals of human memory. It is not painful simply in its existence but in its perpetuity. 

Pain is cruel in the same way as sound— it is omnidirectional, bleeds across boundaries and nerve endings— jus it is ineffable. When Triss tries to explain to someone the sensations that coursed through her at Sodden— in the moments of the burning and in its aftermath of seeming eternities piled up around her like the bodies of soldiers, of her friends who had gone there in search of some nebulous notion of the greater good— words do not cannot lay a finger on the sensation. 

The closest she had found, in all those nights pouring over tombs rather than facing the inevitable reliving of the sensations she cannot name or explain as they bleed her chest dry from the outside in, she found in a musty tome about word etymology: 

Excruciating. Pain out of crucifixion. 

How dreadfully human to have a word the extremity of pain born out of crucifixion— how dreadfully human to believe that agony comes from the stakes through the hands and not the truth that death comes most often from slow asphyxiation in front of an audience of oscitant onlookers, bored with the mundanity of this new show of suffering. 

But still, excruciating isn’t enough to make someone understand and as she tries, she finds herself clawing at a way to do justice to the memory without the vicariousness of onomatopoeia or screaming herself horse— in trying to distill raw sensation into the sound into a word approximating it. 

Philippa, in a rare moment of unfiltered sincerity in the days since they had left Sodden together and every fiber of Triss’ being was still gripped with crushing fatigue, had laid beside her on the bed of some nameless inn in some nameless town which became the backdrop to the ceaseless ebb and flow of Triss’ hazy aching, unbroken in every moment of lucidity. 

“Stop crying, and tell me where it hurts,” she half-whispered, as though afraid to puncture the soft lull of the countryside asleep, “how it hurts. I’ll see what I can do.”

Triss hadn’t even realized she’d been crying.

But the words, the tender urgency, sends Triss careening, in her half-asleep stupor of ever-thrumming exhaustion, memory accosts with unflinching force. She is back at Sodden, on the Hill, and some healer, someone, Tissaia maybe, or Sabrina, or Coral— no Coral died before her, she remembers that, remembers her unblinking stare and the screams, she remembers the screaming— someone though, in the moment again, someone is holding her down and half-shouting at her, “Stop crying and tell me where it hurts!” 

But she can’t stop howling. Miserable, she wants to scream back, “it hurts! It fucking hurts and I don’t know where!” 

And even now, in the three-fold detachment of the half forgotten moment re-remembered, the pain in her chest persists, a constant in the periphery, a half forgotten phantom limb pain in the places the fabric of the healing magic they’d use to knit her skin back together must have strained itself, not quite matched against the degree of damage.

— 

Triss slips out from between the curtains, and casts a cursory glance back at where Philippa was sleeping only a moment before, finding her sitting up, awake— probably having reached for her in her sleep and awoke having found nothing but cold sheets beside her— and Triss finds herself caught like a deer in the headlights of her steady gaze. 

It is in these moments, when Philippa’s dark eyes might’ve betrayed something akin to love— but whether wishful thinking, or a trick of the low light, Triss cannot be sure nor does she think she wants to know. There is something less sharp, less cold, like she is thawing in these moments, if only temporarily that Triss thinks she could drown in if Philippa would let her. But she doesn’t. 

“Come back to bed,” Philippa says, more order than request, still burrowed deep in the covers, but there is no force in it. 

Triss doesn’t deny her. There is something magical in the way moonlight softens Philippa, Triss thinks— her honesty cannot be used against her here, if only because in the half-light of these moments, they are granted the leniency of plausible deniability. 

Triss thinks maybe she lives only for these moments, sometimes. It is a sort of game they play, she thinks. These moments when Philippa catches her in her sleeplessness, grants her the courtesy of pretending not to notice the way Triss’ voice catches when she answers her— always the same question.

As she lays into Philippa’s embrace, she feels the tip of her nose, cold against the back of her neck, she breathes, barely audible, “tell me how it hurts” and goosebumps rise at the sensation. 

Afraid her tongue will betray her, Triss fumbles for Philippa’s hand in the dark, sandwiching it between her own when she finds it, and lifts it to her chest, rests her hand just below her left clavicle and splays Philippa’s freezing fingers with her warm ones and begins softly drumming them on the bone— the closest approximation of the thrumming sensation she feels whenever Philippa is near. 

She feels Philippa bury her face deeper into her shoulder, no doubt obscuring the sight in Triss’ hair, but she doesn’t pull her hand away— just softly copies the pattern Triss taps out with her own fingers and says nothing.

She wonders if this is what love feels like. 

It is times like this she wonders if she really is as much a foolish child as Yennefer sometimes seems to think she is— she rarely says it but betrays it in her eyes. 

There are times when Yennefer is exhausted with her, and still she listens as Triss has the same startling epiphany she’s had a hundred times before and no doubt will have again a thousand times more that Philippa is backing herself into a corner of her heart where it only ever snows— where Triss’ contempt will always taste like grief. 

She is dragging Triss with her and Triss knows it and she’s sobbing to Yennefer over the megascope, “I can’t— I can’t do this— again. Can’t follow her like a hunted doe longing for an arrow. Gods, you shouldn’t love someone who hurts you.” 

And the way Yennefer looks at her, as though she believes Triss thinks nothing and feels everything, a look bathed in pity. To Yennefer, she realizes she must be that girl, the overly attached girlfriend who feels love before she feels shame.

She should feel angry, and true, she wants to scream at her, “do you realize that staying soft is the hardest thing I’ve ever done?” but remembering it now she mostly feels cold. 

How foolish Yennefer must think her if she genuinely believes Triss doesn’t realize that every story with her in it is both a love story and a haunting.

Here, in Philippa’s embrace it is easy to forget that before she knows it, it will be the next morning and the space where Philippa is will be empty— cold where Triss expected the warmth of a body. Foolish really, to expect what was never offered to her— like insisting on knocking on the frozen ground until her knuckles bleed, trying to prove her hands are capable of undoing the cold. 

Philippa never thaws fully, and not for long, she knows this, but still. It has been so long since she felt warm enough anywhere but in Philippa’s arms so she allows herself to bask in it— the sensation of Philippa’s breathing as it slows, and her fingers still as she pretends to drift back to sleep.

Triss pulls their hands, fingers still laced together and whispers all the things she can never say, warming Philippa’s fingers with her breath. She knows Philippa is still awake, has spent enough time watching the slow rise and fall of her chest, the way her fingers twitch when she is asleep to know, and Triss is also aware Philippa probably knows that she’s only pretending she can’t hear. 

And still, she lets Triss continue, lets her kiss her palm softly before pulling Philippa’s arms tighter around her— lets her do so most nights they spend together. In these moments, Triss wonders if she truly is the only thing Philippa loves as much her own detachment. 

After all, she sees how Philippa keeps herself hidden away, safe behind her own arrogance. It doesn’t make Triss love her any less. It just makes the love sharper, harder to carry, harder to let go of— adoration and desecration two sides of the same knife.

**Author's Note:**

> I can remember literally nothing about the climate of Redania or the area around Montecalvo and google was ultimately unhelpful, so if it doesn't get cold there, that is my cross to bear. 
> 
> Also I spent like 20 minutes trying to figure out a setting-appropriate replacement for "deer in the headlights" but they all sounded stupid so I gave up.
> 
> As always, would love any feedback you'd like to give


End file.
